Category: Art

This article was first published (without images) in The Courtauldian. Leighton House Museum’s latest exhibition is a commemoration of a promised gift to the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, from one of the most significant private collections in North America. The group of eighty drawings was collected by Dr Dennis T. Lanigan, an oral and maxillofacial surgeon whose fascination…

Greco-Roman sculpture has always been a source of intrigue for generations of artists, collectors, connoisseurs, and even tourists. The Venus de Milo in the Museé du Louvre is one of the most popular exhibits and has been a symbol of ideal female beauty and sophisticated taste for many art critics over the years. When the…

Studio 3 Gallery presents Beautifully Obscene: The History of the Erotic Print, 15th May – 12th June 2015. The exhibition aims to cover a range of artists, technical and thematic approaches spanning over the course of 500 years. The principal aim is to study the aesthetics of the human form and sexuality in order to…

Two years ago the Griffin Gallery in West London launched its first Griffin Art Prize competition for UK-based artists who graduated within the past five years. The winner of the prize is awarded a six-month residency at the Griffin Gallery and Studios, resulting in a solo exhibition at the gallery with a published catalogue. They…

Over the weekend the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden launched its annual contemporary arts festival Deloitte Ignite, now in its seventh year, with a series of free public events. The month-long festival (5th-28th September 2014) brings together dance and the visual arts, leading to a collaboration between the Royal Ballet and the National Gallery’s…

The art world is about to get a little bit more exciting as the Louvre opens the doors to a new museum in Abu Dhabi in December 2015. The Louvre Abu Dhabi seeks to be a universal museum, embracing cross-cultural similarities instead of differences with its newly-bought collection. The Musée du Louvre’s Louvre Abu Dhabi:…

An artist sits in a wheelchair, a large pair of scissors in one hand, the other holding on to a large sheet of orange paper. Aided by his studio assistant, the Russian-born Lydia Delectorskaya, the great Henri Matisse swiftly and rapidly cuts the piece of paper into a wavy, algae-like form. Similar shapes are then…

It has been roughly 3 hours since I left Marina Abramović’s 512 Hours show at the Serpentine Gallery in London and I am still out of breath. The experience was incredibly surreal and everyone will have varying responses, evidenced by the exhibition’s Participant Chronicles on Tumblr. I went with a friend from university, Maria, and…

For the first time in the history of France, a major retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe has landed in the Grand Palais in Paris. The show features 250 works by the American photographer ranging from his highly sculptural nudes to his controversial images of sexuality and eroticism, BDSM and sadomasochism. Robert Mapplethorpe, Sonia Resika, 1988.

A version of this article also appears on the Studio 3 Gallery blog. In the space of ten seconds, how many female artists can you think of? Now repeat the same exercise but with male artists… Off the top of my head I counted four female artists – Artemisia Gentileschi, Barbara Hepworth, Marina Abramović and…

Dear readers. How often do you look carefully at the buildings portrayed in paintings? How many times have you focused on the painted surroundings more than the figures in the image? For the majority of you, “very little” is likely to be your response. Building the Picture attempts to reverse this, forcing us to look…

What is ‘painting’? A general dictionary definition of the term might be along the lines of “a process of applying paint to a surface for artistic effect”. In the world of contemporary art, this term has gained a significant amount of leeway, substituting paint for alternative media. The GRAD: Gallery for Russian Arts and Design…